Last ditch stand politics revisited

By Herb Feith

YOGYAKARTA (JP): Sunsets can be tranquil or turbulent. In the turbulent ones there is often a moment of intense brightness just before the sun disappears. The American cultural historian William Irwin Thompson developed his theory of "enantadromia" on the basis of that phenomenon.

The theory explains a great deal of what happened in the last two months of Soeharto's rule, and what is happening in Malaysia today.

It also helps to account for the fact that many well-informed observers of Indonesian politics thought in March, April and early May of this year that Soeharto would see out another five- year term as president.

Enantadromia as it bears on politics is basically a theory of desperate behavior. It sets out the new options to which rulers turn when they are cornered, and when new challenges have emerged to which their previously successful policies are irrelevant and they are faced with new challengers which their earlier methods are incapable of suppressing.

Desperate situations call for desperate measures. Hardline advisers argue that some of the restraints the ruler previously accepted need to be set aside.

Unconventional thinkers come into their own, as do imaginative intelligence operatives of Machiavellian outlook. Their message is simple, though paradoxical: "You badly need to buy time. You need to discredit the dissidents who are saying you are finished. To do that you must persuade people that it is 'businesses as usual', that the dynamics of politics is basically unchanged. But to do that you need to act ruthlessly".

The extraordinary behavior of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad in relation to his one-time protege and long-time deputy Anwar Ibrahim over the last month -- the strange accusations and physical intimidation and violence -- make sense if Mahathir is indeed fighting for his political life.

Theories of last stand politics are a useful tool in relation to otherwise unaccountable ruthlessness in Indonesia as well. They help to explain the kidnapping and torture of 21 opposition activists in March and April, including Pius Lustrilanang and the 14 who have yet to reappear. They help to account for the shooting of four students at Trisakti University on May 12, and they offer a plausible hypothesis in relation to the systematic and "engineered" side of the rioting, burning and raping of the days immediately after.

* The July 27 affair.

There had been a dress rehearsal to this year's grand show held between May and July 1996. It seems clear that Soeharto himself decided in May of that year -- after weeks of hesitation -- that Megawati had to be knocked out of the leadership of the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI). He was eventually convinced that he could not otherwise be sure of a Golkar victory in the May 1997 elections.

He seems to have fully appreciated the risks involved. Political sophisticates have described it as a situation of "maju kena, mundur kena" (we will be hit if we go forward and hit if we go back).

The decision to intervene forcefully led to army operatives organizing a special PDI congress in Medan in which Soerjadi replaced Megawati as chairperson of the party. It also led to the early morning attack on the party's Jakarta headquarters, which sparked the large-scale rioting of July 27, 1996. In combination these two actions succeeded in buying the regime time, almost 22 months in fact.

* The "Second Police Action" of December 1948.

The Catholic Party-dominated Beel government of the Netherlands faced a similar dilemma in the last month of 1948. Its negotiations with the Republican government of Vice-President and Prime Minister Hatta were stalled.

The Republicans were proving to be stubborn opponents, unwilling to acknowledge their military weakness and political divisions. Having suppressed the Communist revolt which broke out in Madiun in September (now known as the "Madiun Affair"), they became bolder after American opinion began to shift in their favor.

Gen. Spoor, the commander in Jakarta/Batavia at the time, argued that diplomacy had failed. The time had come, he told his civilian superiors, for Indonesian nationalists to be taught a lesson. A quick strike at the Republic's three or four remaining urban centers would get the government to the point where it was negotiating with a far more amenable group of Indonesians.

Many Dutch leaders, both in Jakarta and the Hague disagreed, officers as well as civilians. Ruthless military action would merely inflame nationalist passions, they argued, and increase international sympathy for the Republic, as had happened during the maverick Captain Westerling's time in Sulawesi (Celebes) two years earlier.

But the Beel government eventually agreed to act on Spoor's advice. In defiance of UN-brokered cease-fire arrangements, Spoor's forces attacked and occupied the Republican capital of Yogyakarta and other towns in Central Java and West Sumatra on and after Dec. 18, 1948. Sukarno, Hatta and many other nationalist leaders were captured and taken into exile in remote parts of the country.

It proved to be a disastrous mistake. The quasi-puppet governments the Dutch had established in parts of West Java and East Indonesia under their control resigned in protest. Guerrilla resistance became more vigorous than ever before and a campaign of scorched earth operations against Dutch-owned plantations and factories began.

The Dutch also came under stronger internationally fire than ever before. Support for the Indonesian Republic emerged in the U.S. Senate and the Truman administration threatened to cut Holland out of its Marshall aid program unless it began negotiations with the Republican leaders it had just jailed.

By the middle of the year the Dutch had decided to cut their losses and by December had formalized that decision, abandoning their claim to sovereignty in the archipelago.

The new entity which emerged, the Republic of the United States of Indonesia, was federal in form, which helped the Dutch to save face, and it did not include West New Guinea, today's Irian Jaya. But it was nevertheless a state headed by Sukarno, the Indonesian most feared and hated by the Dutch.

In the words of a Greek saying: "When the gods are about to kill a person, they blind him first".

The writer, an Australian political scientist, is currently a visiting lecturer at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta.